Last chance for coliseum redevelopment

If redevelopment ideas fail, council will push to tear down city's former events center

CORPUS CHRISTI - The City Council will make one last attempt to entertain redevelopment ideas for Memorial Coliseum and if it fails, a majority said, they’ll knock it down.

The city will issue a request for proposals to all developers who previously expressed interest in refurbishing the building and advertise for bidders locally, online and in national newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal.

For any project to win the council’s approval, the developer would have to prove its financial means, pass a background check and fast-track the project in time for an October 2010 groundbreaking.

Even as council members discussed what they want from potential developers, some members indicated little faith that a project would emerge.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult to get adequate funding for adequate projects right now,” Councilman Mark Scott said. “I’m feeling very comfortable at the end of this process ... saying it’s been good, we tried, and it’s time to remove the building. Let’s plant some grass and get on with our lives.”

The request for proposals doesn’t specify what the city wants developers to do with the coliseum. It can be anything that draws tourism and fits the city’s plans for the bayfront.

Projects will be scored on a 100-point scale, based most heavily on the project’s compatibility with the bayfront plan, the company’s financial capability and the project’s design and cost. Projects will also be evaluated based on the developer’s experience, how much city participation is required and how quickly the project can begin.

The schedule proposed by city staff, modified since the council first saw it, suggests a Sept. 15 council vote on the project and an Oct. 27 council vote on a final agreement.

But several council members weren’t happy about the delays.

“I’m ready for us to do something,” Councilwoman Chris Adler said. “We talked about making a decision 90 days in. We’re already a month in and we haven’t done anything yet. We need to get on with this.”

City Economic Development Director Irma Caballero, who proposed the schedule, said it could be expedited slightly, but it was already requiring developers to fast-track projects.

“This is a galloping speed,” she said. “It may not look like it.”

Councilman Kevin Kieshnick said the city has tried too many times already to redevelop the coliseum and didn’t think the city would see anything new this time.

“The project has been beat to a pulp,” he said. “The horse is getting a little bit dead.”

Likewise, Councilmen John Marez and Larry Elizondo said they felt the city had done all it could.

“I think what I hear most resoundingly is that (city residents) are fed up,” Elizondo said. “They are tired of the extensions. They are tired of committees. They are dead tired of listening to the rhetoric.”

Mayor Joe Adame said he wanted to pursue the last round of bids for the city residents hoping some of the proposed projects work.

At least four developers are interested in the coliseum. The National Swim Center Corp. has suggested converting it into an Olympic swimming center; San Antionio developer NRP proposed a mixed-use development with apartments, offices and shopping, and Corpus Christi IceRays owner Tim Lange wants to covert it into a public ice rink and home for the minor league hockey team. San Antonio developer Rick Rodriguez is also interested in the property, but has not said what he wants to do with it.

Councilwoman Nelda Martinez, who served on a coliseum reuse committee for nearly two years, said she would accept tearing the building down as a last resort.

“My hope and prayer is that we find an adaptive reuse,” she said.

The council was originally set to hold the discussion about the coliseum request for proposals in closed session, but Adame said he decided to move the discussion to open session. City Attorney Mary Kay Fischer said the city shouldn’t have gone into executive session for the discussion under an economic development exception in the Open Meetings Act, which was listed on the meeting agenda. It could meet in closed session to discuss the length of a lease, under an exemption that applies to real estate, but she said that discussion would have had to be “very limited.”

The coliseum was the city’s primary events center from 1954 until the American Bank Center opened in 2004. It also is a war memorial and is considered architecturally significant.